Art & Border Relations

Born in Mexico City in 1967, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. He has shown at Biennials in Havana, Istanbul, and many other cities internationally. His most recent public art commission was for the activation of the Raurica Roman Theatre in Basel (2018), among many others. He has received many awards, including two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London. In the past two years, Lozano-Hemmer was the subject of 9 solo exhibitions worldwide, including a major show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

Curator Kerry Doyle specializes in projects that are interdisciplinary, participatory and performative, with a special focus on the border. She regularly collaborates with individuals and institutions from both El Paso and Ciudad Juarez in the execution of interdisciplinary and community-engaged programming. She has curated and organized original exhibitions, commissions and performances by international artists including Tomás Saraceno, Tania Candiani, and many others. In November 2019 she curated Border Tuner by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a large-scale, ephemeral public art installation that engaged more than 10,000 visitors in real-time cross-border conversations. She was a fellow at the Smithsonian Latino Institute (2009) and the Getty Institute for Museum Leadership (2014).

Based in Texas, Peter Svarzbein is a photographer, curator and disruptive media specialist. During graduate school at the SVA, Svarzbein created the El Paso Transnational Trolley Project, a self-created activist/artist project that resulted in a $97 million state grant for a Intra-city trolley route using the Original Streetcars that ran between Juarez, Mex, & El Paso, Tex. He is currently the proud City Representative for District 1 in El Paso, Texas and is working on legislation to reintroduce the Juarez-El Paso trolley line once again.

Independent critic, curator, and writer Lyle Rexer is the author of The Critical Eye: 15 Pictures to Understand Photography (Intellect Ltd 2019), The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Aperture 2009), and Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, (Harry N. Abrams 2002) and others. He has published hundreds of catalog essays and articles on art, architecture, and photography and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Harper’s, Art in America, among others. He has lectured at many institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University, among others, and he teaches in both the graduate and undergraduate programs at SVA.